Political Economy Of Higher Education Research Articles

Black Feminism and the Failures of the Contemporary “Neoliberal” University Critique

This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS’s engagements with the “neoliberal function” of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders’ denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the “neoliberal critique” of the university itself.

Virtual Tour as Digital Branding Tool in the Political Economy of Higher Education: Case of Virtual Tour 360 UPNVJT

Virtual Tour as Digital Branding Tool in the Political Economy of Higher Education: Case of Virtual Tour 360 UPNVJT

‘The unofficial curriculum is where the real teaching takes place’: faculty experiences of decolonising the curriculum in Africa

This paper analyses faculty experiences tackling global knowledge asymmetries by examining the decolonisation of higher education in Africa in the aftermath of the 2015 ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student uprising. An overview of the literature reveals a rich debate on defining ‘decolonisation’, starting from a critique of Eurocentrism to propositions of alternate epistemologies. These debates are dominated by the Global North and South Africa and their experiences of curriculum reform. Our focus is on the experiences of political scientists in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. These countries share the same Anglophone political science traditions but represent different political trajectories that constitute a significant condition for the discipline. The 26 political scientists we interviewed acted toward increasing local content and perspectives in their teaching, as promoted in the official strategies of the universities. They noted that what was happening in lecture halls was most important. The academic decolonisation debate appeared overambitious or even as patronising to them in their own political context. National politics affected the thematic focus of the discipline both as far as research topics and students’ employment opportunities were concerned. Although university bureaucracies were slow to respond to proposed curricula changes, new programmes were approved if there was a market-based demand for them. International programs tended to be approved fastest. Political economy of higher education plays a role: dependency on foreign funding, limited national resources to conduct research and produce publications vis-à-vis international competition, and national quality assurance standards appeared to be most critical constraints for decolonising the curriculum.

Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal Education and the Legal Profession

This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from 'cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated. Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.

Capitalism in Academia and the Theory of Academic Capitalism: Political Economy of Higher Education in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Abstract The theory of academic capitalism (ac) is a prominent attempt to grasp the multifaceted organizational and functional transformations of universities and higher education (he) in contemporary times. However, this has rarely provided an in-depth examination of the meaning of capitalism in the context of he and has largely ignored the Global South. Focusing on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this paper begins by examining the political economy of this country’s little-studied he system. It explores its entanglements with the broader Jordanian political economy by focusing on for-profit private universities and the implications of capitalist (foreign) ownership for their functioning and governance. The article draws, in part, on novel interview data gathered by the author in Jordan from 2015–17 to elaborate Jordanian he elite’s understanding of this system. The Jordanian case is juxtaposed with ac to appraise the applicability of the theory to contexts distinct from advanced capitalist economies.

Reimagining university–community engagement

This article is based on a keynote address to the second Higher Education Conference in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the environmental and inequality crises confronting South Africa and the world. After an examination of the societal context of universities, the article discusses critical issues in relation to university-community engagement. It attempts to address these issues by firstly providing an overview of the long-standing debates in our country concerning the academy’s responsibilities and accountability to various constituencies beyond the universities gates and the imperative to rethink scholarship to engage communities meaningfully. Secondly, it will provide an appreciation of the overarching political economy of higher education and the corporatisation of universities before drawing conclusions about the processes that impede or allow the university to be responsive to community engagement. The article will provide a few historical and contemporaneous examples of the work of university-based researchers with various communities. The research of those who have an orientation toward working class communities and aim to democratise knowledge production will be highlighted. It will be argued that the latter’s “praxis epistemology” (Amini 2017) assists us in reimagining university-community relations.

Introduction: The University We Want

Introduction: The University We Want Timothy Shenk (bio) It’s over, kind of. After more than a year of Zoom purgatory, millions of Americans—students, faculty, administrators, and all the workers who make a modern university run—are heading back to campus. In this special section of Dissent, we take a close look at the world they’re returning to as higher education stumbles beyond the pandemic. That starts by acknowledging that much of academia today looks the same as it did in March 2020, except with more people wearing masks. Universities are still trying to squeeze every last bit of tuition revenue out of students, whether it’s cash-strapped publics making up for cuts in state funding, ivy-covered privates looking to add an extra billion to the endowment, or for-profits grifting while they can. Deans and sub-deans keep proliferating, while the ranks of the tenured dwindle, adjunctification marches onward, and graduate students ask what they’re supposed to do next. All the old political battles are waiting to be picked back up, only everyone is angrier than they were eighteen months ago, and journalists need to fill a Trump-sized gap in pageviews. It’s as if they all spent the pandemic at home working on their tinderboxes. Now they’re back together waiting to see who remembered the match. Contemplating this gloomy scene, it’s easy to forget that higher education is more than the sum of its scandals. For a country with a reputation of anti-intellectualism, the United States invests an enormous amount in its colleges. And for institutions that are supposed to traffic in the higher things, universities offer an attractive return on the investment. Along with hospitals, they anchor an economy built on eds and meds. They’re incubators for the technologies shaping our lives, from the fetal monitors tracking an unborn child’s heartbeat to the computers that will ruin the poor kid’s brain. They brew ideas that take over political debate: hello, critical race theory. More than ever, they’re where Democrats—and socialists—are made. And they’re still the envy of the world, one of the few pillars standing in the crumbling edifice of American global hegemony—like Hollywood for nerds. Although views on the relative merits of all this will vary, the scale of the thing can’t be denied. [End Page 17] So we won’t try to. Instead, this section will take the beast apart piece by piece. A symposium featuring Tressie McMillan Cottom, Maggie Doherty, Christopher Newfield, Adam Harris, and Nils Gilman takes stock of the changes wrought by the pandemic. Jennifer Mittelstadt and Ian Gavigan explore the prospects for industrial-style organizing within the university, considering what it would take to bind students and all university workers together into a coherent movement. Davarian Baldwin surveys the political economy of higher education in a conversation with Sam Klug. Lyra Walsh Fuchs examines a new frontier in college activism: pathbreaking efforts by feminists to bring the principles of restorative justice to cases of sexual harm while ensuring safety for all. Mike Rose details the obstacles preventing students at community colleges—especially working-class, first-generation students—from turning their education into a tool for social mobility. Michael Kazin and I reflect on the politics of higher education from two sides of the generational divide. And Lucia Geng makes her debut as Dissent’s first college columnist with a report on the strengths and limits of a mutual aid movement that flourished among students during lockdown. Taken as a whole, the section offers a bracing assessment of the state of higher education: clear-eyed in its analysis of the challenges ahead, but unwilling to give up on the possibility of meaningful reform. It’s a section for anyone who has seen how rarely universities live up to their own stated ideals, and how easy it is to twist high-minded arguments into rationales for exploitation. It’s also a section for anyone who believes in what universities could be: a community devoted to human flourishing, where students are invited to join a vital conversation about what makes life worth living. Welcome back to...

The future of value in digitalised higher education: why data privacy should not be our biggest concern

Universities around the world are increasingly digitalising all of their operations, with the current COVID-19 pandemic speeding up otherwise steady developments. This article focuses on the political economy of higher education (HE) digitalisation and suggests a new research programme. I foreground three principal arguments, which are empirically, theoretically, and politically crucial for HE scholars. First, most literature is examining the impacts of digitalisation on the HE sector and its subjects alone. I argue that current changes in digitalising HE cannot be studied in isolation from broader changes in the global economy. Specifically, HE digitalisation is embedded in the expansion of the digital economy, which is marked by new forms of value extraction and rentiership. Second, the emerging research on the intersection of marketisation and digitalisation in HE seems to follow the theories of marketisation qua production and commodification. I argue that we need theories with better explanatory power in analysing the current digitalisation dynamics. I propose to move from commodification to assetisation, and from prices to rents. Finally, universities are digitalising in the time when the practice is superseding policy, and there is no regulation beyond the question of data privacy. However, digital data property is already a reality, governed by ‘terms of use’, and protected by the intellectual property rights regime. The current pandemic has led to ‘emergency pedagogy’, which has intensified overall digitalisation in the sector and is bypassing concerns of data value redistribution. I argue that we urgently need public scrutiny and political action to address issues of value extraction and redistribution in HE.

IR, the Critic, and the World: From Reifying the Discipline to Decolonising the University

Why does IR scholarship seem so resistant to travel into other disciplinary spaces? To answer this question, I look at the tendency for scholars within our discipline to talk to the discipline, about the discipline, and for the discipline. We obsess over ‘IR’ and, in doing so, reify IR as a thing. I turn towards Edward Said’s arguments about the worldliness of texts, and how reification shapes how ideas travel. I then provide two illustrations of how scholars have reified IR as a thing: Robert Cox’s approach to critical theory and Amitav Acharya’s call for a ‘Global IR’. In both cases, contrary to expectation, the authors reify IR as a thing, portraying the discipline as distinct from the world. IR is treated as something with agency, ignoring how disciplinary knowledge is produced within worldly institutions. I conclude by looking at three strategies for studying worldly relations in ways that refuse to reify the discipline: showing disloyalty to the discipline, engaging the political economy of higher education, and seeking to decolonise the university. Rather than reifying IR, these strategies help us to engage our scholarly work in a way that prioritises worldly critical engagements within our disciplinary community, and the world.

The Crisis of Higher Education in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract This article explores some of the literature on the political economy of higher education. It suggests growing contradictions between the need for available funds and competition for students, research dollars, and new educational “products,” such as online education. It refers to that literature that raises contradictions between the global “market” for students and tuition fees. And it also raises issues of the quality of education, particularly as non-job-oriented programs are dismantled. Purdue University, a land-grant public university, is suggested as one example of these contradictions.

Political Economy of Higher Education: Research and Science in Contemporary Brazil

This article discusses how the economic forces since the Brazilian State Apparatus Reform structure higher education policies and, consequently, how they order the form of science production in Brazil. With the reduction of the State in the Public Sphere, Public Higher Education in Brazil started to be guided by economic activities, so the structuring policies for knowledge production also began to accompany such a milestone of change in the logic of work and research production, development and innovation. In this broad conjuncture, Brazil has been a part of the process of globalization of Higher Education and has been intensifying academic and scientific work since the 1990s under the logic of the international market.

Situating science in Africa: The dynamics of computing research in Nairobi and Kampala.

Since the turn of the century, both Kampala and Nairobi have experienced a dramatic growth of computer science research, challenging accepted views of science in Africa. We deploy qualitative methods to follow active computer science researchers, graduate students, policy makers, administrators and entrepreneurs, in order to understand how computer science is enacted in these two cities. Our analysis focuses on four interrelated areas of labor, institutions, identities and scale. We illustrate the dynamics and frictions of computer science research across these areas, revealing the interlacing of moral economies of science and the political economy of higher education, the management of precarious professional lives and desire to get research done, and the pluralistic imaginations and multiple scales of computer science. Urban centers in East Africa are increasingly active in supporting granular and connective research communities that are socially transformative in ways that challenge conventional views of Africa as technologically dry. In this way, the computer science communities of Nairobi and Kampala are instructive for thinking about new geographies of science and technology studies.

Others’ Words, Others’ Voices: The Making of a Linguistic Anthropologist

Starting from a recent flash of reflexive illumination experienced as a member of a dissertation committee, this act of (re-)constructive retrospection recalls the principal forces, experiences, and individuals that shaped my career as a linguistic anthropologist and turned my interests toward poetics, performance, language ideology, and remediation. Retracing my steps—sometimes halting, sometimes headlong—along the winding path that I have followed makes clear the degree to which my career has depended on the generous and energizing influence of my mentors, teachers, and colleagues, but also on the frustrating roadblocks placed in my way by less generous and understanding figures that led me to turn toward what proved to be far more productive directions. This reflexive process has also made clearer to me than ever before how strongly my career has been affected by the shifting conditions imposed by the political economy of higher education as I made my way in academe.

Capitalismo acadêmico e reformas neoliberais no ensino superior brasileiro

Resumo Este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar o exercício de compreensão da economia política do ensino superior a partir da contextualização e descrever os principais programas governamentais desenvolvidos nos governos Lula e Dilma. Exploramos a categoria capitalismo acadêmico para um exercício inicial de análise das reformas neoliberais no ensino superior brasileiro. Essa categoria busca identificar as múltiplas formas e significados, por meio das quais comportamentos de mercado e pró-mercado têm sido adotados pelas universidades estadunidenses para criar processos de integração à chamada nova economia em busca de fontes alternativas de financiamento. Ao aproximar os programas governamentais brasileiros à ótica do capitalismo acadêmico, identificamos que as mudanças impostas pelas alterações na legislação contribuem para a reestruturação das práticas acadêmicas e criam condições para a implementação do regime acadêmico capitalista. Entretanto, o viés funcionalista-sistêmico-estrutural da categoria e a necessidade de mediação com o concreto impõem limites para o entendimento das reformas no ensino superior do país. Vislumbramos que, para refletir sobre as implicações da lógica neoliberal nas reformas em países dependentes como o Brasil, é necessário retomar o pensamento do sociólogo brasileiro Florestan Fernandes e submeter a categoria padrão dependente de educação superior, formulada por ele na década de 1970, a mediações histórico-concretas coetâneas para compreender como as reformas em curso se relacionam com aquele padrão.

Contributors

Contributors

The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector’s emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the introduction for the special issue, this article makes the case for a multidimensional strategy to probe higher education’s competitive transformation. In terms of conceptualizing the major empirical shifts, we argue for analyzing three core phenomena: varieties of academic capitalism, the discursive construction of inequality, and the transformation of hierarchies in competitive settings. With respect to theoretical tools, we emphasize the complementary contributions of institutional, class-oriented, and discourse analytical approaches. As this introduction elaborates and the contributions to the special issue demonstrate, critical dialog among different analytical traditions over the interpretation of change is crucial for improving established understandings. Arguably, it is essential for clarifying the respective roles of capitalist power and hierarchical rule in the construction of the sector’s new order.

Re-engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety

This article analyses the political economy of higher education, in terms of Marx and Engels’ conception of subsumption. It addresses the twin processes of formal and real subsumption, in terms of the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and the re-production of academic labour in the name of value. It argues that through the imposition of architectures of subsumption, academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. The article employs Marx and Engels’ categorizations of formal and real subsumption, in order to work towards a fuller understanding of abstract academic labour, alongside its psychological impacts. The article closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour.

Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour under Capital

This paper deploys an orthodox Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption of labour under capital (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx’s concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se . The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Moreover, the paper aims at showing that a discussion of the university dominated by capital with reference to the functioning or constituting of markets does not provide real opportunities for the understanding and solution of such problems as precarization, exploitation or acceleration of academic work. Thus, it joins a wider stream of Marxist higher education research and could be seen as a conceptual contribution to a critique of the political economy of higher education.

Contesting the Political Economy of Higher Education: Educating the Good Citizen

Contesting the Political Economy of Higher Education: Educating the Good Citizen

For-Profit Universities in the Political Economy of Higher Education

For-profit institutions loom much larger in the political economy of US higher education. In negotiations over the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the for-profit universities and their lobbying organizations have played a unique role in shaping policies affecting all higher education institutions. Can states preserve egulations that protect the public and private benefits of higher education while satisfying the profit demands of an evolving postsecondary market? As with most political contests, much will depend on the ability of a variety of postsecondary stakeholders to become involved in the political arena shaping higher education.